Caseycolor_0.jpg
Essay
By Invitation
Color

Critical semantics shows us “literary history, refracted” (13). It allows us to “tell a story about a vanished world” and “see the century in five words” (176, 2). It charts how “luminous usages” have dramatic effects on a word’s semantic history (4). Greene’s Five Words is replete with gestures towards visual experience, but its role is most explicit in his account of “envelopes,” words that speak to “things people saw with their own eyes, and yet necessarily saw through the eyes of allegory” (111). When we see one of these envelopes in action, however, the basic stuff of vision escapes sustained attention. Blood, Greene’s example of an envelope, comes to be seen “as simply itself” in early modern writing (109). It appears as “a substance, a liquid that has a reality apart from the allegories of religion, history, and medicine”—but what features obtain in that reality apart from allegory (109)?

Aristotelian scholastics, like Francisco Suárez and Eustachio of St. Paul, maintained that all substances were colored and the existence of that color was not predicated on eyes or minds. Scholastics, then, might take Greene’s mention of blood’s substance to necessarily imply its redness, but how is it that we can call blood red? It appears blue beneath flesh. When it reflects light it seems partly white. Poets in antiquity were prone to calling its appearance purple. If blood is red in itself, what is red in itself? Greene approaches the problem of color’s inconstancy when he cites Morocco’s aim to “prove whose blood is reddest” in The Merchant of Venice (2.1.6-7). This is taken as an instance where notions of blood are simultaneously “heavy with accumulated meanings and light of real significance” (129). Color is also evidently meaningful here, but it is not immediately clear how or why. Color’s meaning hinges on the object to which it attaches, but the object to which it attaches is only ever available, as it were, in color. Color’s ubiquity invites a certain kind of initial complacency, but as soon as we look closely at it we find, as Sir Thomas Browne did, that what is “most manifest to the senses” is inordinately “obscure to the understanding” (230).

When Galileo challenges the classical and scholastic idea of the world’s inherently colorful nature, telling us that color is naught but an “empty name” for something that “inhere[s] only in the sensitive body,” our common sense notion of visual experience is upended (185). Color is not, then, a feature of our world, but rather a feature of us. Descartes, Boyle, Hooke, Grimaldi, and others would worry over what color was with greater nuance over the early modern period, but Newton’s impact is perhaps the most famous. Building off earlier theories, he renders the quality of color a quantitative matter. To return to Greene’s example, blood at the beginning of the early modern period is red and merely appears redly by the period’s end. Entire worldviews are at stake in this distinction. Deciding on how color has purchase on reality means deciding whether phenomenal experience or scientific abstraction accurately conveys truth. Despite or perhaps because of the metaphysical problems of color, early modern writing traffics constantly in it across various discursive spheres.

Setting aside the problems of defining particular colors encountered by early modern lexicographer, [1] color in generic terms could be reliably used as a metonym for the contingency of this temporal plane. Aemilia Lanyer, for instance, tells us that “gaudy colors soon are spent and gone” (188). It might equally serve to highlight judgement’s vulnerability to sense experience. Sor Juana, for example, warns against the “false syllogisms of tint and hue” (falsos silogismos de colores) (59/47). Yet color can just as easily be metaphorically deployed to convey a particular kind of insight. “By portraying myself for others,” Montaigne says, “I have portrayed my own self within me in clearer colours than I possessed at first” (Me peignant pour autruy, je me suis peint en moy de couleurs plus nettes que n’estoyent les miennes premieres) (323/665). Color helps describe internal and external states alike, but it is not clear that it means anything in itself. It is instrumentalized to point to the truth of certain things and falsity of others.

Color, in early modern rhetorical terms, meant figurative language. The colors of rhetoric communicate something more than propositional content. They show that language can be used non-literally, can speak outside the bounds of truth and falsity. In Puttenham’s account, poetry’s colorful rhetoric “inueigleth the iudjement” in a way that ordinary speech does not (8). Actions, no less than words, are called colored when they trouble judgement. Calvin tells us that the custom of confession ceased because “a certain woman faining that she came to confession, was found so to have colored under that pretence the unhonest companie that she used with a certain Deacon” (fol. 140v). Color indexes a gap between what seems and what is. Color’s absence is then noted to close this gap. The Princess, in Tyler’s translation of Calahorra’s The Mirrour of Princely Deeds, is “not able to colour her affections” (70). Internal states are made external affairs through the language of color. Using color in these ways emphasizes that judgment is predicated on sense experience, but we also see that truth sometimes exceeds sense experience or is perverted by it.

The Blason des Couleurs, a fifteenth-century book frequently translated and published in new editions across the sixteenth century, does not tarry with color as such, but rather tries to fix the significance of particular colors by tying each of them to human qualities (e.g. Violet means loyalty [90]). It tries to establish an effective semiotics of color and render color experience less contingent upon perceptual experience. Color could, for the author of the Blason, be coded such that it signified something other than itself.[2] Rabelais refers to the Blason’s practice of defining color’s meaning the very “practice of tyrants” (l’usance des tyrans) (234/117) What color means, he tells us, is a result of natural law and does not need scholarly argument. Merely look around the world, he says, and you will see that black just means mourning (238/123). Discussions of color again lead to divisive ends. Whether the features of the world are inherently meaningful or whether that meaning is composed by us is yet another question posed by color.

Color led to abstract problems, but it also had practical consequences on early modern life. Sumptuary laws fixed certain colors to certain social statuses and thus rendered status a perceptual matter. One could see a courtier chromatically. Novel hues like indigo from India or cochineal red from Peru meant profit for merchants, exoticism for consumers, and exploitation for the people whose lands were colonized. Global trade endeavors show that color is in and of itself valuable, but that that value is culturally relative. At the English Factory in Edo, Japan, Richard Wickham discovers that his clientele crave only what he calls the “saddest cullors” (172). Over and above what color means is color’s ability to transmit some inchoate feeling or affect that is not necessarily explainable. Just as defining color in literal terms is a difficult if not impossible project, so too is explaining why it is that color moves us in the ways it does.

This emotive dimension of color is most explicit when the color of skin is at issue. Lazarillo de Tormes tells us that upon first meeting Zaide, a black man (un hombre moreno) who becomes his stepfather, he was afraid of him because of his color and bad disposition (el color y mal gesto que tenía) (6/113). Complexion and attitude have equal purchase on judgment. Zaide’s own son becomes afraid of him when he recognizes that his mother and brother are white (6/113). The cause of this fear is left unarticulated, thus an emotional reaction to color difference is somehow intended to be intuitively clear to the reader. The cause of skin color wavers across early modern thought—from conceptions informed by the Bible to one’s informed by climate and geography—but these causal accounts never quite explain why recognizing color difference should have affective force. When Pierre-Esprit Radisson finds himself captive and naked before a group of Iroquois people, he does not speak their language and assumes that their “laughing and howling” must be related to the color of his skin which “was soe whit in respect of theirs” (118). Not only does skin color cause an affective reaction, but affective reactions are registered in skin color. Whether one blushed spontaneously or applied blush cosmetically factored into discussions of feminine vice and virtue. Humoralism looked under the skin by attributing values to the different colors of bile. Mere color never seems to be taken as simply a quality of things or matter of perception. Melancholy etymologically means simply black (melas) bile (khole), but more readily stands for a certain kind of sadness.

The semantics of color change depending on an array of contextual factors. Its meaning varies as much as our visual experience of it varies. It can speak to permanence as much as impermanence. It can highlight authenticity and duplicity at once. The only consistent feature of color’s usage is that it often goes unnoticed. It is a feature of writing and the world that is perhaps too ubiquitous. Color is, as I have outlined above, remarkably well-suited to the work of critical semantics, but it also pushes at its limits. It continually draws attention to what Greene calls “the physical reality we see with unlettered eyes” (112). Critical semantics, as Greene notes, is motivated in part by a desire to avoid limiting empirical horizons to literary ones. Color stubbornly keeps these empirical horizons in mind, but it also asks us to broaden the scope of literary scholarship. The “unlettered” experiences of oral cultures and blind people as well as the “unlettered” work of textiles and fine art, to note just a few examples, play important roles in grasping how early modern color functioned. Critical semantics helps us notice and remark upon color’s rather unwieldy discursive role, but my hope is that attending to this semantic integer necessarily pushes us beyond both semantic and historical concerns. The complexities of color may come to the fore in the early modern period, but they are not limited to it. Getting a handle on color’s role in early modern writing through critical semantics is, I think, a necessary initial step towards understanding how this seemingly trivial, arguably secondary, and often banal feature of visual experience can play such an integral, subtle, and recalcitrant role in contemporary life.

Works Cited

Anonymous. La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, y de Sus Fortunas y Adversidades. Edited by Aldo Ruffinatto. Madrid: Castalia, 2001.

Anonymous. Lazarillo de Tormes. Edited and translated by Ilan Stavans. New York: Norton, 2015.

Browne, Sir Thomas. Pseudodoxia Epidemica. In The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne. Edited by Norman J. Endicott. New York: Norton, 1972.

Calvin, John. The Institution of Christian Religion. London: Reinolde Wolfe and Richarde Harison, 1561.

De Calahorra, Diego Ortũnez. The mirrour of princely deedes. Translated by Margaret Tyler. London: Thomas East, 1578.

De La Cruz, Sor Juana Inés. “Soneto 145.” In Antología de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Edited by María Luisa Pérez Walker. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1993.

---. “Sonnet 145.” In Selected Works. Translated by Edith Grossman. New York: Norton, 2015.

De Montaigne, Michel. “Du démentir.” In Les Essais. Book 2. Edited by Pierre Villey. St-Germain: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965.

---. “On Giving the Lie.” The Complete Essays. Translated by M. A. Screech. New York: Penguin, 1993.

Farrington, Anthony, ed. The English Factory In Japan, 1613-1623. Volume 1. London: British Library, 1991.

Galilei, Galileo. The Essential Galileo. Edited and translated by Maurice A. Finocchiaro. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008.

Greene, Roland. Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Labé, Louise. Complete Poetry and Prose: A Bilingual Edition. Edited and translated by Deborah Lesko Baker and Annie Finch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Lanyer, Aemilia. The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeroum. Edited by Susanne Woods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Rabelais, François. Gargantua. Edited by Pierre Michel. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.

---. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Translated by M. A. Screech. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Radisson, Pierre-Esprit. The Collected Writings, Volume 1: The Voyages. Edited by Germaine Warkentin. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012.

Scaliger, Julius Caesar. Exercitationes exotericae de subtilitate. Paris, 1557.

Sicille. Le Blason des Couleurs en Armes, Livrees et Devises. Edited by Hippolyte Cocheris. Paris: Auguste Aubry, 1860.


[1] Early modern dictionaries deploy various strategies in order to define colors. For instance, “Bleu” in Hollyband’s A Dictionary of French and English (1593) is defined as “skie colour.” Timothy Bright’s Charactery: A Short, Swift, and Secret Writing By Character (1588) tends to define particular colors as simply “colour.” There are also numerous examples of colors being defined in ways that defy our expectations. “Pink,” for instance,” is “a kind of yellow used in painting” in Phillips’ A New World of English Words (1658). I have relied on the University of Toronto’s Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) for these definitions. This tool is available at http://leme.library.utoronto.ca/ .

[2] The literary consequences of the Blason can be seen in Louise Labé’s mention of “pages and servants decked out in uniforms with colors representing [their master’s] long-suffering devotion, perseverance, and hope” [pages et laquai habillez de quelque livree representant quelque travail, fermeté, et esperance] (234/117).mRather than using colors to signify traits, traits could, following the Blason, signify colors.

Join the colloquy
Colloquy

Critical Semantics: New Transnational Keywords

This Colloquy arises from a 2018 MLA Convention session I organized on behalf of the Forum on Comparative Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. The original call for papers read simply: "Extend and critique Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Roland Greene's 2013 reorientation of early modern studies. What does Greene miss?

more

Craft a 'lightning talk' using one new keyword." As session organizer, I received a bumper crop of submissions, each passionately advocating for its own concept. Several papers extended Five Words in surprising ways, but only a handful took the further step of directly engaging Greene’s innovative "critical semantics" as a practice or method. Four of those composed the panel in New York City, and Roland Greene agreed to offer each of them a formal response. The resulting conversation brought diverse approaches to bear on a single focused intent: the deployment of philological skill to capture the flow and entanglement of ideas across European cultures. Although rooted in early modern studies, each contribution was quickened by twenty-first-century urgency, mobilizing critical semantics as an archaeology of what Arjun Appadurai would call transnational ideoscapes (1996: 36-37). The four papers and Greene’s response yielded powerful questions that overflowed our conference timeslot, and as audience members—including many whose excellent proposals I had been unable to include—expressed their admiration for the format as well as the speakers, it became clear that publication was warranted. We thank ARCADE for hosting this Colloquy as the next step in our conversation.

Our topic is timely, because we live in an age of keywords. They structure our research, our publications, and our teaching. From EEBO to Google n-grams, the keyword search has become a modern equivalent of dipping a pen into ink, where, as the nursery rhyme goes, "some find the thoughts they want to think." Humanists have learned from, or perhaps bowed to, scientific ways of mapping knowledge by digitally analyzing the strength and pattern of meaningful terms, which engineers call "keyword co-occurrence networks." When we submit abstracts for conferences or journals or course catalogues, keywords must be provided; indeed, for this Colloquy’s original panel the MLA program required five keywords—why must it be five?—that were not Roland Greene’s words or the titles of our presentations. But keywords today are not confined to bureaucratic subtexts. On the contrary, they increasingly structure the titles of scholarly lectures, articles, and monographs. Literary titles, which used to trade in riddling questions or ambiguous genitives, now unspool as paratactic lists: consider the examples of Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2005), and Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015). How starkly the listed terms differ from the neologisms of high theory! In fact, almost all the diction in these titles belongs to what Raymond Williams in 1976 called "a general vocabulary ranging from strong, difficult and persuasive words in everyday usage to words which, beginning in particular specialized contexts, have become quite common in descriptions of wider areas of thought and experience" (2014: xxvii). After all, the title of Keywords itself derives from a household object, no less important for being used every day.

For an object that is continually being declared obsolete, the physical key has proved astonishingly resilient. (Although smartphones can now unlock your house or car, Google has signaled the limits of virtuality by manufacturing a low-tech security key that physically authenticates users, supposedly reassuring them that their data is safe from hackers.) Yet the key’s stubborn materiality contrasts with the abstraction that some of Williams’s successors emphasize in their modern anthologies of keywords. A striking example is Keywords for Today, a 2018 volume produced by an Anglo-American scholarly collective and edited by Colin MacCabe and Holly Yanacek. This text variously updates, replaces or adds new entries to Williams’s collection of complex words. For our purposes, the additions and subtractions are telling: gone, for example, is the entry on materialism, while the very first entry explores a new keyword, which is abstract. In line with this remarkable substitution, some entries call attention to how twenty-first-century vocabulary shrinks from its material base, such as the evolution of market into the "hardened abstraction" of the market, with its tyrannical definite article (2018: 231). Other entries, however, seem blind to their own abstraction, as when image skims over the physical consequences of socially mediated aesthetics as distorted by technology. By contrast with Keywords for Today, Greene’s Five Words elaborates its critical semantics "by trying to make tangible what is often abstract and obscure" (2013: 8), offering literal analogues to its polysemous terms (the palimpsest for invention, the pendent for language, and so forth) in order to underscore the dynamic relay between the material and the discursive in early modern cultures.

Greene blazes two further pathways unfamiliar to modern literary taxonomists. The first is historical. By slowing the brisk diachronic sweep of keyword etymologies down to the Renaissance and Baroque, Greene tunes in to subtler rhythmic patterns, finding in the so-called "discovery of language in early modern Europe" not only new words but new relations between them: thus terms like tongue and language are described as "neither dependent on nor independent of one another," but instead "pendent" or reciprocally clarifying and energizing (53). Elsewhere, Greene catches terms in mid-transformation, charting how blood is redefined by the "literalism of the sixteenth century" and the "vitalism of the mid-seventeenth" (115). The other pathway is comparative. Williams long ago noted that "many of the most important keywords … either developed key meanings in languages other than English, or went through a complicated and interactive development in a number of major languages," but predicted that the necessary "comparative analysis" would require an "international collaborative enterprise" (2014: xxxi). The difficulty of such work is evident in the case of Keywords for Today, which explores only one term recognizably borrowed from beyond the Anglosphere—the Sanskrit karma, which is quite properly adduced to demonstrate "the danger of trying to limit English semantics to its traditional homelands" (2018: 207). Alert to such danger, in Five Words Greene has provided a single-authored study that boldly and succinctly takes up Williams’s internationalist challenge.

Or at least he has done so for the terms blood, invention, language, resistance, and world. "Many words," Greene writes, "are like these words," continuing: "I have envisioned extending this sort of project to every word on a given page by Rabelais, Sidney, or the Inca Garcilaso, distributing the terms to scholars with the injunction not only to explain their semantic changes over time but to set each discrete word in motion with the others" (2013: 14). Such is the gauntlet taken up by this ARCADE Colloquy. Each essay collected here is to double business bound: the authors have each chosen a single transcultural keyword from the early modern period, and they have set their keyword in motion with Five Words as well as cognate or "pendent" terms they find essential. The reader will observe that not all their words are nouns. Nor are their keywords all self-evidently "ordinary," and on occasion they explicitly put that descriptor under pressure. The contributors draw into the discussion features of early modern worlds that Five Words did not have the space to map, including visual culture (John Casey’s color), radical politics (Crystal Bartolovich’s common), the poetics of ecology (Vin Nardizzi’s grafting), and the philosophy of science (Debapriya Sarkar’s utopian). Far from some rote parataxis, however, these keywords allow the reader to adapt Greene’s tools for ever deeper exploration. On its publication, Five Words was lauded no less for its stylistic elegance than for its conceptual ambition. Bookended by that study and Greene’s generous response to the four initial essays, this Colloquy probes new interventions in literary studies and rewards the reader with unexpected results.

References

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Greene, Roland. 2013. Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

MacCabe, Colin and Holly Yanacek, eds. 2018. Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Williams, Raymond. (1976) 2014.  Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Join the Colloquy

My Colloquies are shareables: Curate personal collections of blog posts, book chapters, videos, and journal articles and share them with colleagues, students, and friends.

My Colloquies are open-ended: Develop a Colloquy into a course reader, use a Colloquy as a research guide, or invite participants to join you in a conversation around a Colloquy topic.

My Colloquies are evolving: Once you have created a Colloquy, you can continue adding to it as you browse Arcade.